Many different types of commercial and production endeavors require that a primary product produced and/or by-products thereof are to be dried at a stage after production process. Drying is generally needed in, for example, food processing, fertilizer production, sludge removal and processing, chip and bark processing, agriculture manure processing, and in the processing of distiller's grain, cotton, soybean hulls, mine tailings, coal fines, pellets and powders employed in nuclear waste water cleaning, and many other applications.
By way of example, equipment and systems used for drying or de-watering have been proposed over the years, and have met with varying degrees of success. Such equipment has taken the form of presses (particularly screw presses), centrifuges, gravity screens, and thermal dryers of varying configurations and energy sources. In many of these types of units, drawbacks have included high purchase and operating costs, low output or throughput levels, a lack of range of drying ability, production of “burned” end product, and emissions control problems. In order for a new equipment design or approach to find some level of acceptability, the equipment should address one or more of the above drawbacks, and provide superior features over existing designs.
Many products, in order to serve their intended purpose, are subjected to thermal drying processes in order to reach the level of dryness necessary for use of the product. Thermal drying is, however, a high cost operation. For cost reasons, many products can only be partially dried by known methods, as the price that such products are able to command does not allow for the cost of thermal drying. In many instances, these partially dried products could have a more beneficial use if the cost of drying were lower.
Many, if not most, refined products are thermally dried. There have been known efforts that attempted to develop a practical non-thermal air-drying system that would provide the necessary commercial production rates, but at a lower cost than that of thermal drying. The possibility exists that the end product would be of a higher quality, as well. It would appear that to date, known efforts have not yielded any truly promising systems or designs.
One object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus and method for achieving a high production rate, with drying comparable to known high-cost thermal drying, at a cost lower than that of known thermal drying equipment.